Work As Emotional Terrorism

You and I both know it.

Decent article here about “leaders” who spend every all-hands meeting talking about financial metrics that most of the organization doesn’t understand or cannot connect back to their work — so, about 90% of leaders — with some good quotes and approaches, but like every other article ever written about work, it utterly misses the point that consistent discussion of financials, growth, and wealth-building is the closest thing many executives have to “fun” in their lives, so no, they’re not about to stop doing it anytime soon. Shipping product, grinding, being in 17th gear and beating rivals constitute the purpose of those guys. You take their ability to talk about CAGR and Q3 beating expectations away, you basically just killed them. In their minds, they just became a 1950s housewife. And fuck if they know how to roast a ham.

That’s the problem with most orgs and most work suggestions: they ignore psychology. An executive does not care about words like “engagement.” He views engagement as what just happened to his daughter, Brooke — and honestly he only cares about that because he has to pay for the wedding (goddamn Kevin, his family is loaded. Can’t they help out?). An executive cares about money, and engagement to him (or her) is about making money, growing, beating rivals, and showing you “won.” Bezos is the grand puba of these guys in some ways; go look up his speech in Berlin in 2018 where he refers to his Amazon net worth as his “winnings.” What do you win? A game. That’s how these guys look at work.

Now, I’ve had dozens of jobs where executives call an all-hands and discuss financial metrics, and eventually most people are tuned out or playing on their phone. Ironically, that’s the same thing that happens in most diversity trainings. And what’s the commonality? It’s that people kinda sorta “get” that this is important — good financial metrics mean we can make payroll, and diversity seems like a good thing! — but they have no idea how it relates to their day-to-day work and tasks. Like, what if you don’t face revenue? OK, so how can you adjust these metrics then? Or what if you’re a middle-aged white man/woman trying to feed their family? Diversity and inclusion seem important, but what can you really do? That’s the same mindset that got us “I’m Listening” lawn signs, too.

Good point further down this article: